Today over at Midtown Lunch, Dave Pasternack, the chef and co-creator of Mario Batali’s highbrow fishery Esca, sits down for a quickie profile. There’s nothing particularly revelatory (that angle was more than covered in a lengthy New Yorker profile from 2005), but we just couldn’t wrap our heads around one little thing:

Favorite Kind of Food: I mean, I like everything  but my favorite is ethnic food. I find it more intriguing. I’ve worked in fancy restaurants for 25 years, but my favorite foods are still Chinese, Thai, Indian pretty much everything.

Channel 2 has picked up on an upsetting trend at the Chelsea Dog Run — hounds getting high on a mystery drug that some are saying is crystal meth. We're actually, astoundingly, not joking here. Three dogs have died and many more have fallen ill after consuming mystery substances while playing at the park on 22nd Street. The organization NYCdog has issued a warning to pet owners across the city. "After the first incident, it was believed to be an isolated case where an illicit drug may have fallen out of someone's pocket," a press release said. "But now, with nine reported cases, it appears to be the act of deliberate poisoning." The Channel 2 report said that some owners even saw a stranger feed their dogs before they fell ill. Many will probably think that the obvious culprits — those damn meth-loving Chelsea gays — are behind this, but if there's anything that gang treasures more than sleeveless tees, it's puppies. We smell a setup!
Danger in the Dog Park: Is Someone Giving Your Pooch Drugs? [Channel 2]

New Yorkers live longer than other Americans, and in last week's New Yorkcover story, Clive Thompson tried to explain why. We walk more than most Americans, he pointed out, we climb more stairs than most Americans, and many fewer of us die young of onetime urban plagues like murder and AIDS. We have great hospitals and lots of healthy-eating options, and, as he noted, people who are ambitious and hard-working and appearance-focused can be just as Type-A about their health as about everything else. But leave it to a marketer to isolate the mysterious X factor, the key reason New Yorkers live longer than everyone else. It came in a press release this morning, and it's beautiful in its simplicity: "Life Expectancy for New Yorkers Increases as Snapple Grows in Popularity." Why didn't Clive think of that? Oh, the press release was, of course, from Snapple.

Simply airing TV commercials featuring an insidiously catchy jingle is apparently no longer an adequate way to sell cat food, and so the Meow Mix people yesterday opened the "Meow Mix Acatemy" (Get it? A-cat-emy? Hilarious) in the Daryl Roth Theater on Union Square. For the next week, New Yorkers will be invited to "learn to think like a cat" by taking seminars with titles like “Feline Freud,” “Understanding Your Cat’s Meow,” and “What Is My Cat Doing and Why.” For the opening-night festivities last night, a fifteen-piece marching band from St. John’s University played that dastardly tune, accompanied by cheerleaders chanting “LETS GO COOL CATS!”

The polls have closed on our Meatopia V theme contest, and we have a winner! We sort of have four, actually. Given their truly mind-bending menus, three readers could not be denied entrance to our infanticidal bash. We look forward to meeting them tonight. Our grand-prize winner will not come to Meatopia alone. She may bring three guests along, too. The lucky carnivores are listed below.

Katie Couric just can't get a break – the embattled CBS Evening News anchor doesn't have to just struggle with sagging ratings, now she also has to deal with a new hatchet job by celebrity unauthorized biographer Ed Klein. The Daily News unearthed a few nuggets from Katie: The Real Story today, and it ain't pretty. Klein claims (quoting, as always, anonymous sources) that Katie's marriage to late husband Jay Monahan was basically over well before he succumbed to colon cancer in 1998 — and that she's subsequently painted a happy portrait of their relationship to strategically position herself as a struggling widow. Not to butt in further, but relationships during illness are complicated, difficult, and private. This accusation seems like a low blow even for Klein, whose similar books about Hillary Clinton and the Kennedys were best-sellers. The author also claimed that Couric was jealous of co-presenter Ann Curry and tried to get in the way of her advancement. Which is funny, because we always thought the only thing getting in Curry's way was her own inability to complete a sentence.
Talk About Katie Hatin' [NYDN]
Related:Alas Poor Couric [NYM]